Saigon Is Under De-facto Martial Law

Saigon Is Under De-facto Martial Law

June 17, 2018| Hundreds of people were stopped, detained, searched, and later taken to a temporary holding center set up in the heart of Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City) for apparently no reasons.

The government, this time, did not even announce that there were any “illegal” public gatherings as in the previous weekend where thousands of people protested against the cybersecurity and Special Economic Zones draft laws.

What they have done instead, was to preemptively take a strike at all of the citizens who were happened to be in those hot spots of last week’s protest. Some did go out to the streets with the intent to participate in a demonstration, but they could not even start.

From the early morning, all types of police, secret police, and security forces have filled up various areas in Saigon. Many coffee shops near the Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica were asked to close by the authorities.

One witness reported that police were arresting people at a McDonald’s nearby. The only group that acted provocatively was the police and other security forces, this person wrote on Facebook.

The security forces watched every single bystander, people who happened to pass through the area. Anyone who looked “suspicious” to them would get stopped, asked for identification, searched, and demanded to show their phones where any pictures that were taken would get deleted.

All were done without any probable cause and of course, without a warrant.

It seemed as if the law no longer existed there. The city was under siege by its police force, and the people lived under martial law.

Worse, there would likely be no recourse in a court of law for the victims, even if some of them could gather enough courage to file a complaint against the authorities.

One person who was arrested while working near Nguyễn Văn Bình Books Street and detained until that evening said on Facebook, that she felt the experience eerily reminded her with words from Anne Frank’s Diary.

She also recalled that others were taken into separate rooms and some got beaten up by the police. The beatings must be very violent because everyone at that detention center could hear the screams. When they tried to run towards the room to help, the police stopped them with threats of physical violence, recalled by another witness.

The victim – who later got identified as Trinh Toan – was taken to the hospital for head injuries and reported to be in a coma since.

Those who got released were cited for “disrupting public disorder,” ironically.

Another witness live-streamed to tell her story after her release. She described how she and other Catholics got picked up by the police on their way to church. They were taken to that very same detention center in Tao Dan Park and later were both beaten and abused verbally.

A Vietnamese overseas detailed how the security forces physically subdued him and assaulted him while he was strolling near his house close to Hoang Van Thu Park. The police only released him after he screamed out some profanity in English and revealed his foreign nationality.

Some other people were already taken into police custody with no warrant a few days before last Sunday.

One of them was Nguyen Tin. He described the police physically assaulted him, smacking his face repeatedly when he refused to speak and answer questions while in custody. The right to remain silent does exist in Vietnam, but in this case, it failed to protect the citizen.

Almost all of the pro-democracy activists in Vietnam had plainclothes officers surveilled their homes this past week to prevent them from leaving the house and joined the protest.

On social media, many more people were reported missing in the past 48 hours, and efforts by civil society groups are ongoing to document and identify those who were arrested, detained and/or suffered abuse.

Phil Robertson from Human Rights Watch tweeted today:

“Brutality of #Vietnam authorities attacking activists opposed to new internet surveillance law is really off the charts! Time for #Hanoi to be called out by U.N. Human Rights Council, U.N. General Assembly for their rights crimes!”

From the June 10, 2018 protest, the authorities might have arrested about 300 people in Saigon alone. One of them was an American citizen, Will Anh Nguyen, whose story made headlines internationally. Vietnam police filed charges against Nguyen for “disturbing public order” on June 15, 2018, and continued to hold him in detention.

This past weekend, Saigon was the city that got suppressed the hardest. It is estimated that over 100 people arrested and detained and the number of injuries caused by police brutality is still being counted.

Self Immolation in Vietnam: A Victim of Injustice’s Agonizing Act In Defiance

In the afternoon of July 2, 2018, a man committed self-immolation in the center of Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city, a few steps away from the Central Citizen Reception Committee’s office on Ngô Thì Nhậm Street.

He was later identified as 58-year-old Bùi Hữu Tuân, former village chief of Đạo Ngạn Village, Hợp Đồng Ward, Chương Mỹ District, Hanoi.

The victim is now in critical conditions with severe burns to the whole body.

Mr. Tuân was charged with Article 356 of Vietnam’s Penal Code for “abusing official position, power in the performance of official duties.”

He was supposed to begin his sentence of 3-year-imprisonment today, July 3, 2018. In the last act of defiance, one day before its commencement, he desperately protested the injustice of the trial and his conviction.

He was charged, tried, and convicted with not only insufficient evidence, but the evidence at trial showed that the prosecution did not even have any evidence for one element of the crime they had charged him with.

His son told VOA Vietnamese in an interview on July 2, 2018, that after Tuân failed to get the Central Citizen Reception Committee’s office agreed to halt his sentencing while reviewing his complaint to the Government Inspectorate, he went outside and committed the self-immolation.

Article 356 prescribes: “Any person who, for personal gain or other self-seeking purposes, abuses his/her power or position in performance of official duties to act against his/her official duties and as a result causes property damage of from VND 10,000,000 to under VND 200,000,000 or infringes upon state interests, lawful rights and interests of another organization or individual shall face a penalty of up to 03 years’ community sentence or 01 – 05 years’ imprisonment.”

From Pháp luật Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh (The Law – Hochiminh City) newspaper, the most damning evidence against Tuân was that he – as the village chief – allegedly accepted money, along with the requests of some 23 families in the village, to ask the local government to give them lands to build their ancestors’ shrines and worship places. Yet, none of this money went to Tuân or any of his two co-defendants, as it was donated to the village.

The local procuracy’s office (the prosecution in Vietnam) and the court further alleged that he had overstepped his authorities in giving out land slots to the villagers, and thus had committed a crime under the above penal code.

According to them, he had abused his “official duties” even though some people questioned whether the village chief position could be considered an “office”.

At the trial court level, Tuân was convicted and sentenced to the maximum term prescribed by law: 5-year-imprisonment. The appeal trial upheld his conviction but reduced the sentence to 3 years.

The appellate court’s decision in upholding his conviction with actual imprisonment was the last straw for Bùi Hữu Tuân, and he committed the unimaginable act of setting himself on fire.

From a legal standpoint, Tuân was correct in protesting his conviction and his sentence because the first element of the crime “abusing official position, power in the performance of official duties” seemed to have been conveniently ignored throughout his criminal proceedings.

In the same article published back in November 2017, Pháp Luật newspaper reported that it was established at trial that all of the money which Tuân and his co-defendants received from the villagers, was donated to various community services projects in the village.

Neither Tuân or any of his co-defendants had used any portion of the money for personal gains.

In other words, it is almost certain that the prosecution would not be able to prove the first element of the crime alleged against him, that he did commit an act for personal gain or other self-seeking purposes.

Worse, the evidence further showed that Tuân did submit the villagers’ requests to the ward’s officials, asking them to give out the land to people for burial and worship purposes. Pháp Luật newspaper also wrote, back in November 2017, that they had interviewed the villagers independently and were told that the local officials were present, at all times, to survey the land with the defendants.

And while Tuân and two of his deputy chiefs were tried and convicted, none of the ward’s officials had to face criminal charges even though the same evidence could be used against them.

By the same token, it could be argued that if the evidence were not enough to file charges against the local officials, then it certainly would not be enough to convict Tuân and the co-defendants.

Undeniably, Tuân’s trial and conviction again delineate the inefficient and broken legal system in Vietnam where people can be charged, tried, and convicted with no evidence to prove the required elements of the crime.

“Minds” over Facebook: Vietnamese Netizens’ Great Cyber Exodus?

In the past two days, the “F-Generation” of Vietnam started what seems to be an online exodus when many well-known Facebookers announced that they are moving on to Minds.com – an alternate platform for social media.

The “F” in F-Generation stands for “Facebook” as the online social media giant has a dominant presence in the country where some statistics raised the number of users to be between 50 to 60 million.

For about two months, people had been protesting both online and offline against the latest Cybersecurity law which was passed by an overwhelming 86.86% of the National Assembly.

The law raised concerns over Internet users’ privacy, people’s freedom of expression, and their right to access the Internet.

Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, declared: “This bill, which squarely targets free expression and access to information, will provide yet one more weapon for the government against dissenting voices. It is no coincidence that it was drafted by the country’s Ministry of Public Security, notorious for human rights violations.”

In less than two days, some of the prominent Facebookers have received thousands of subscribers over at their freshly minted Minds accounts.

In the same time, reports of pages and personal accounts have been taken down by Facebook also surfaced.

Trương Thị Hà, a victim of police brutality during the last “Black Sundays” protest, announced on Minds this morning that her account has been deactivated by Facebook.

After she posted a letter to her university professor, asking him to explain why he stood there while the police brutalized her during her detention after the protest, that very post was deleted for “violating Facebook community standards” at about 8:30 a.m. Then, her entire account seemed to have disappeared by 10:40 a.m.

According to author Claire Bernish who wrote about Minds back in June 2015, Facebook could finally meet its match. Minds gives users the familiarity with many features they have already accustomed to on Facebook while commits to protecting their privacy.

“Minds takes the government’s eyes out of the equation by encrypting private messages and using open-source code that any programmer can check,” Bernish explained.

“We are a free and open-source platform to launch your digital brand, social network, and mobile app. We are also a social network ourselves. It is a global social network of social networks,” the Minds team declared.

The hacker collective Anonymous also backed Minds, citing the fact that the founders of the new online social media shared the same vision of those who use the Internet for activism.

According to the Wired UK: “Two of those on the Minds team – Bill Ottman and Lori Fena – have strong backgrounds dealing with privacy and freedom of expression issues and are both known for their internet-related activism. It is likely these are the type of people that the company is hoping to attract – those with a cause, who want to build something and share it openly with others who may also have a cause.”

President Trần Đại Quang signed the Cybersecurity bill into law on June 25, 2018, although some 27,000.00 signatures of citizens who had expressed their objection to the proposal of the law, were delivered to his office during the prior weekend.

It seems as if the activists and human rights defenders from Vietnam might have found a friend in Minds because the reason they chose Facebook in the first place, was to use the platform as a tool to advance a cause: promoting human rights and democracy in the country.

While not all of them agreed to the solution of leaving Facebook and saw that as a sign of defeat, the silence from Facebook during the last two months as the Cybersecurity law stormed the nation could force many activists to reconsider whether to continue to use it as their primary platform. Most are still using both platforms, but all seemed to agree that if Facebook agreed to comply with the new Cybersecurity, then it could mean they will have to leave for good.

Vietnamese netizens are no strangers to such online “resettlement.” Back in 2009, when Yahoo 360 blog closed down its operation, Facebook quickly became the next best choice in the country.

Almost ten years later, while Facebook could still enjoy its reign in the country as the most used online social media platform, the power of Vietnamese users should not be underestimated by anyone.

Afterall, Vietnamese are a group of people whose contemporary history entwined with mass migration and exodus. They have a lot of experience with starting over, yet again, and they will not be afraid to do so.

Civilians, victims of police brutality and arbitrary detention, academics, activists, researchers, and a lot more people from all walks of life inside and outside of Vietnam got together and produced a report on the two “Black Sundays” of June 10 and June 17, 2018.

It is the Vietnamese people’s unified and firm response to the vicious repression by the government during the latest rounds of protest in the country.

According to the Facebook page of Nhật Ký Biểu Tình (Protestors’ Diary), copies of the report have been delivered to the UN OHCHR, other international NGOs working on human rights as well as various foreign embassies.